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if not turn his back altogether,’ he wrote in his pioneering study of 1899, Prostitution in Naples.122 Elsewhere, di Giacomo described just what ‘gentlemen’ such as Caravaggio might find when they walked though the brothel’s discreetly concealed door and entered its upper rooms: ‘These rooms nowadays would be called higher chambers. Since the end of the 16th century, by which time the Cerriglio was already famous, they had made up a separate quarter [of the tavern] … in one of these little rooms, in circa 1671, a slave was caught practising what are nowadays referred to as certain psychopathic sexual acts, which were thought of in less scientific terms in the seventeenth century and punishable with beheading.’123 The only sexual act punishable by beheading was sodomy. The Cerriglio clearly catered for a wide range of sexual appetites.

Caravaggio’s problems arose when he tried to leave the tavern. He had been followed there by a group of armed men, who waited for him in the street outside as he took his pleasure within. As soon as he walked out of the door, they ambushed him. On 24 October 1609, a Roman newspaper included the following notice: ‘Word has been received from Naples that Caravaggio, the famous painter, has been murdered. Others say disfigured.’124 The rumour of his death turned out to have been exaggerated. He had not been killed, but he had been severely injured.

Within days of the publication of the newspaper report, Caravaggio’s old friend and biographer, Giulio Mancini, put out his own antennae. Mancini did not yet know the full truth, but what he did know filled him with anxiety. He wrote to his brother Deifebo in Siena: ‘It’s said that Michelangelo da Caravaggio has been assaulted by 4 in Napoli and the witnesses say he has been given a facial scar. If so it would be a sin and is [the next word, which begins with a d but is illegible, could be ‘disturbing’ or ‘a disgrace’] to everybody. Let God make it not so.’125

Mancini wrote that Caravaggio had been sfregiato, cut on the face, which in the honour code of the day was an injury inflicted to avenge an insult to reputation.126 The same word had been used by the writer of the Roman news report. It lends both brief accounts of the assault a grim specificity, and explains the other detail gleaned by Mancini: that Caravaggio had been attacked by a group of four men. This was no drunken fracas but a premeditated act, a vendetta attack ruthlessly executed: three men to hold him down, one man to cut the marks of shame into his face.

Years later, the painter’s biographers gave their own terse versions of what had happened. They were unanimous on two points. It was a coldblooded attack – a hit – and it was perpetrated by a man or a group of men from Malta.

Baglione’s report of the assault at the Cerriglio follows seamlessly from his account of Caravaggio’s incarceration on Malta and his subsequent escape. It is clear that Baglione believed the two episodes were linked as surely as cause and effect:

In Malta, Caravaggio had a dispute with a Knight of Justice and in some way affronted him. For this he was thrown into prison. But he escaped at night by means of a rope ladder and fled to the island of Sicily. In Palermo he executed several works, but because he was still being pursued by his enemy he had to return to Naples. There his enemy finally caught up with him and he was so severely slashed in the face that he was almost unrecognisable.127

Bellori, writing considerably later than Baglione, thought the cause of the assault lay elsewhere. In his account it was not the revenge attack of an insulted Knight of Justice, but a mission carried out by implication on the orders of Alof de Wignacourt:

[Caravaggio] felt that it was no longer safe to remain in Sicily and so he left the island and sailed back to Naples, intending to remain there until he received news of his pardon so that he could return to Rome. At the same time seeking to regain the favour of the Grand Master of Malta, he sent him as a gift a half-length figure of Herodias with the head of St John